Sewing on to a PCB is one of the ways to connect textiles to electronic as we know from xslab, Leah Buechley or the Bling Cricket. To do it with Arduino I made this shield for the mini:
On the frontside you have the controller and a power source
the actual board layout sits on the backside. I connected the reset to 5V to prevent random resets.
Once I tested it I will blog the eagle files.
Today we put in snap buttons as connection to a textile bus into the prototypes.
We figured out that we have to work with straight lines to connect to a textile bus. The snap buttons are a neat thing for the children to work with. For the production it means a lot of manual labour. The idea was to have snaps on the textile pcb and on the patches plus a snaps set with tool to put them in in the toolbox. Unfortunatly the snap boxes with the tools are really expensive.
Today we were working on a textile pcb prototype. We even finished the first one.
The technique used is embroidery and we worked with Siw’s sewing maschine. We used a very thin copper wire and fixed it with a zick zag stitches.
That is how it worked:
We started by sketching
and transfered the sketch to the fabric
Did the embroidery
and there we go. Now we put in the Arduino mini and fix it with a wire wrapper tool (and maybe a little bit of soldering)